Fair Game Read online

  Hubbard had a strong financial incentive to get all Scientologists to move out of Victoria. When the Melbourne office was operating in Spring Street, 10 per cent of all fees were making their way back to Hubbard in England. If Scientologists were operating underground in Victoria he got no financial benefit from it. If he could get them over to England he would probably do even better than before.

  The Gillhams were a driving force behind the scores of Australian Scientologists who flocked to Saint Hill. Terri Gillham wonders whether Hubbard had conspired to have Yvonne declared ‘suppressive’, so he could get her and her clients over to England:

  Hubbard had visited them in Melbourne. My mum and dad were very popular. There was no yelling and screaming at their college, there was no nasty conditions and evil stuff going on, it was all really good happy fun stuff, and I think that he saw that it was something that he should control. My guess is that he somehow manipulated the Suppressive Person declare and made certain it could only be handled at Saint Hill. Then she has to go, then Dad has to follow and then he’s trying to get all these Scientologists sent over too and it ends up making Saint Hill look like a very vibrant wonderful place. Scientology was suddenly booming at Saint Hill and then everybody thought, well this has got to be the real deal.35

  Hubbard may have financially benefited from suddenly having around 100 Australians on course at Saint Hill, but he could not avoid the fallout from the Australian inquiry. As Roy Wallis points out in his sociological history of Scientology, The Road to Total Freedom, ‘It was not until 1965 that mention of Scientology began to appear systematically in the British Press.’36 The reports invariably referred at length to the inquiry in Melbourne.37

  The increased scrutiny in England was dangerous for Hubbard. Saint Hill was where he lived, had based his Scientology headquarters and made much of his money from trainees. He could not afford to upset authorities in the UK. How Hubbard handled this threat would change Scientology forever.

  In February 1966, the pressure on Hubbard began to build. Lord Balniel, Conservative MP for Hertford, and the chairman of the National Association for Mental Health, asked the Health Minister in the House of Commons whether he would initiate an inquiry into Scientology, stating, ‘In view of the scathing criticism by an official Board of Inquiry in Australia into the so-called practice of scientology, surely the right Hon. Gentleman considers that it is in the public interest to hold a similar type of inquiry in this country?’38

  The Health Minister Kenneth Robinson told the parliament he had no plans for any form of inquiry. But the Scientologists were planning some investigations of their own. Within two days of Lord Balniel asking questions in parliament, Hubbard had published a memo laying out a plan to ‘get a detective on that Lord’s past to unearth the tid-bits. They’re there.’39 In the same document Hubbard wrote, ‘England’s Parliament is not about to pass or even introduce law barring religion or philosophy. After all these aren’t ex-convicts.’40

  In reality, Hubbard was concerned about developments in the UK parliament. Ten days after Lord Balniel’s intervention, Hubbard set up a ‘Public Investigation Section’, which would employ private detectives from outside Scientology ranks.41 In a memo titled ‘Project Psychiatry’, Hubbard laid out his plan to dig up dirt on psychiatrists and eventually eliminate them from the UK. ‘We want at least one bad mark on every psychiatrist in England, a murder, an assault, or a rape or more than one,’ he wrote.42

  Vic Filson answered an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph and was the first to be hired. ‘I was told that the first victim who was to be investigated was to be Lord Balniel,’ Filson said.43 The detective eventually resigned from the job in disgust and took his story to the press.

  Burned by his experience with the Anderson Inquiry and fearful he may now face similar scrutiny in the UK, Hubbard formulated an official policy on how to deal with investigations. ‘NEVER agree to an investigation of Scientology,’ he wrote. ‘ONLY agree to an investigation of the attackers. This was the BIG error made in Victoria.’44 The correct procedure was laid out in the same policy letter.

  Spot who is attacking us.

  Start investigating them promptly for FELONIES or worse using our own professionals.

  Double curve our reply by saying we welcome an investigation of them.

  Start feeding lurid, blood, sex, crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press. Don’t ever tamely submit to an investigation of us. Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way. 45

  Hubbard’s mission to protect Scientology’s reputation didn’t just rely on Black Ops. Desperate for some positive publicity, he announced his world’s first real ‘clear’. John McMaster was an articulate and charismatic former medical student from Durban. McMaster swore that Scientology helped him deal with the intolerable pain he suffered after having had part of his stomach removed due to cancer. He joined Hubbard’s staff at Saint Hill in 1963 and was pronounced ‘clear’ three years later.46

  McMaster couldn’t really be categorised as Hubbard’s first ‘clear’. He had made the same claim about Sonia Bianca, the physics major from Boston 16 years earlier at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.47 But Hubbard was a master of reinvention, and this time round he made sure he didn’t put his first ‘clear’ on stage to perform unachievable memory tricks in front of 6000 people.

  McMaster would, in the short-term, become an asset for Scientology. Hubbard, at one point, referred to him as Scientology’s ‘first Pope’.48 He toured the world evangelising, delivering a message that was caring and non-threatening, devoid of all the aggression and exaggeration that so often filtered through Scientology’s public pronouncements. But McMaster’s gentle proselytising could not mask the fact that Hubbard’s moods and his policies were getting darker, and that many of the changes he was making to Scientology doctrine reflected a deepening paranoia that followed on from the Anderson Inquiry and the increased scrutiny that flowed from it.

  On 1 March, the Public Investigations Section, which bungled the Lord Balniel muckraking exercise, was ditched and replaced by the Guardian’s Office.

  As Jon Atack wrote: ‘After the false starts of the Department of Official Affairs and the Department of Government Affairs, Hubbard at last had his own private Intelligence Agency.’49 Hubbard’s wife Mary Sue was to run the organisation, which would soon gain worldwide notoriety. Ted Gunderson, a former head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, would later claim that Scientology ‘has one of the most effective intelligence operations in the US, rivalling even that of the FBI’.50

  The Guardian’s Office would not only gather intelligence covertly, it would also conduct ‘noisy investigations’ designed to intimidate its critics and destroy their reputations. Family members, friends and work colleagues would be called or paid a visit and told the relevant person was being investigated for criminal activities. Cathy Gogerly, who moved to Adelaide following the ban in Victoria, gave some helpful hints on noisy investigations that Hubbard then forwarded on to Scientologists across the world:

  Find out where he or she works or worked, doctor, dentist, friends, neighbours, anyone, and ‘phone ’em up and say, “I am investigating Mr/Mrs ________ for criminal activities as he/she has been trying to prevent Man’s freedom and is restricting my religious freedom and that of my friends and children, etc.”’51

  An 800-page training manual was developed for all Guardian’s Office members – known as the ‘B-1 Hat’. Jon Atack describes it as ‘a scandalous compilation of harassment techniques, many derived from the confessions of former military intelligence agents and constructed around Hubbard’s interpretation of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Staff were taught how to lie and how to break and enter, among other scriptural requirements.’52

  Armed with Hubbard’s brutal Fair Game policy, the Guardian’s Office and other Scientologists could attack their critics with impunity. The Anderson Inquiry had scarred Hubbard and he wanted revenge. Two days after Scientology was banned in Victoria, Hubbard rel
eased a policy letter that stated, ‘A truly Suppressive Person or Group has no rights of any kind and actions taken against them are not punishable under Scientology Ethics Codes.’53

  Hubbard wanted his new Guardian’s Office to go after judges and politicians in Australia. He wrote that ‘Principals of the Victorian government such as the “Prime Minister” [sic], Anderson the “QC” and hostile members of the “Victorian Parliament” are continued as Suppressive Persons and they and their families and connections may not be processed or trained and are fair game.’54 According to Hubbard, under the policy of Fair Game a Suppressive Person could be ‘deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.’55

  Scientologists claim that Hubbard later cancelled Fair Game. However, what he said in a revised policy letter was, ‘The practice of declaring people Fair Game will cease. Fair Game may not appear on any Ethics Order. It causes bad public relations.’56 In other words, the policy was never cancelled, but the term was not to be used any more because it had damaged Scientology’s reputation. Scientology continues to attack critics to this day. As Heber Jentzsch, the President of the Church of Scientology once boasted, ‘We’re not a lie-down-and take it type of church. We’re not going to turn the other cheek. If they slap us on one cheek, we’ll slap them right back on both cheeks.’57

  As Hubbard ramped up his policies for shutting down critics, he also began to look for a safe haven for Scientology. In 1966, he headed off to Rhodesia, which just months before had unilaterally declared independence from the UK, and was under the white minority rule of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front.

  Rhodesia at the time was subject to trade sanctions after UN officials described it as an ‘illegal racist minority regime’.58 This did not deter Hubbard. He believed he had been the country’s founder, Cecil Rhodes, in a previous life and saw his trip as a homecoming.59 According to his biographer Russell Miller, Hubbard thought he could solve the political crisis in the capital, find a safe environment for Scientology and recover gold and diamonds he believed that Rhodes had buried there.60

  Hubbard was unable to achieve any of these outlandish goals. He did manage to buy a four-bedroom house in one of Salisbury’s exclusive suburbs,61 draft an unsolicited constitution for the government and put a down payment on the Bumi Hills resort hotel on Lake Kariba,62 which he hoped to turn into a luxury learning resort for high-level Scientologists. But none of this impressed the government. After a stay of around three months, the Rhodesian Department of Immigration refused to renew Hubbard’s visa and he had to return to England. Scientologist Morley Glasier told Jon Atack that Hubbard was actually refused a visa after Glasier – Hubbard’s assistant – was caught trying to take government documents. Glasier served a prison term rather than implicate his boss. Hubbard was simply deported.63

  Hubbard may not have deserved a hero’s welcome at Heathrow, but he got one anyway. On the morning of 16 July, a fleet of buses had been hired to transport around 600 Scientologists to London’s main airport.64 Janis Gillham was one of those who celebrated Hubbard’s arrival at the terminal. ‘No-one knew he had been kicked out of the country in disgrace,’ she says. ‘It was a typical Scientology thing to cover that up by having hundreds of Scientologists there to cheer him.’65 Gillham and the other members of Scientology’s reception committee returned to East Grinstead by bus. Hubbard was driven back in his sumptuous yellow Pontiac convertible.66

  The situation did not improve for Hubbard on his return to Saint Hill. By the end of the month the Church of Scientology in the US had lost its tax-exempt status after the Internal Revenue Service found that it was a commercial enterprise serving the private interests of Hubbard.67 In August, there were further calls for an inquiry into Scientology in the UK, after revelations that a 30-year-old Sussex woman had ended up in psychiatric care following Scientology processing.

  Karen Henslow, who had a history of mental illness, had written to her mother two weeks after joining the staff at Saint Hill, to tell her she was a ‘Suppressive Person’ and that she would be disconnecting from her immediately. Her mother, Hilary Henslow, and the psychiatrist looking after her, demanded the Health Minister set up an inquiry into Scientology.68 Initially the Minister resisted, but the case of Karen Henslow gained national media attention and led to a debate on Scientology in the House of Commons.69

  Hubbard was feeling the pressure and looking for an escape route. The master of reinvention was about to blindside even his closest followers. His ‘Pope of Scientology’, John McMaster, got a hint of what was coming. ‘You know, John,’ Hubbard told McMaster, ‘we have got to do something about all this trouble we are having with governments. There’s a lot of high-level research still to be done and I want to be able to get on with it without constant interference. Do you realize that 75 per cent of the Earth’s surface is completely free from the control of any government? That’s where we could be free – on the high seas.’70

  Hubbard’s most dedicated followers were about to get a crash course in paint scraping, bilge cleaning and the art of triple expansion steam engine maintenance. A committed band of Scientologists would leave their homes, hit the high seas and sign their lives away to Hubbard. But first their man had some business to do in North Africa with the head of the Galactic Confederation.

  CHAPTER 10

  ALL ABOARD

  L. RON HUBBARD’S NEXT move was more typical of a rock star than a religious leader. He hung out in Spain and Morocco, took a lot of drugs, drank a load of rum, did some writing and had a breakdown.1

  First stop was Tangier, a city that attracted writers, artists, swindlers, dope fiends and rent boys. It was the place the Rolling Stones escaped to following their infamous drug bust at Keith Richards’ Sussex manor, where William S. Burroughs wrote his acclaimed novel Naked Lunch, and Hubbard started his work on Operating Thetan Level III (OT III).

  While Burroughs’ work was fuelled primarily by opiates, Hubbard had a history of using amphetamines, barbiturates, opiates and booze.2 In a letter to Mary Sue at the time, he admitted to ‘drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and greys’.3 Pinks and greys are a street name for Darvon or propoxyphene,4 a narcotic prescribed for pain relief. Whatever Hubbard was taking, it wasn’t working.

  After a month in Tangier,5 Hubbard headed to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. Virginia Downsborough, a staff member at Saint Hill, had been summoned to the Spanish city where she found Scientology’s founder in a bad way:

  When I went in to his room there were drugs of all kinds everywhere. He seemed to be taking about sixty thousand different pills. I was appalled, particularly after listening to all his tirades against drugs and the medical profession. There was something very wrong with him, but I didn’t know what it was except that he was in a state of deep depression; he told me he didn’t have any more gains and he wanted to die. That’s what he said: ‘I want to die.’6

  Out of Hubbard’s North African drug binge came Operating Thetan Level III (OT III). According to Scientologists, an Operating Thetan is ‘one who can handle things without having to use a body of physical means’.7 Scientologists believe Operating Thetans have superhuman abilities including telepathy, recalling past lives and the power to cause physical events through willpower.8 Once a Scientologist becomes ‘clear’ they can make progress up ‘the Bridge to total freedom’ right up to Operating Thetan Level VIII (OT VIII). To get to the higher OT levels, a Scientologist needs to commit to a period of intense study and hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  In what the Church of Scientology describes as ‘a research accomplishment of immense magnitude’,9 while popping pills and slugging rum, Hubbard discovered the myth central to OT III. According to Hubbard, 75 million years ago, Xenu, the head of a 76-planet Galactic Confederation, solved an overpopulation problem by sending billions of excess aliens to Teegeeack (Earth) in DC-8 style spacecraft, placing them at the base of volca
noes and wiping them out with hydrogen bombs.

  The disembodied souls or ‘thetans’ were then forced to watch a 3D film for 36 days, which indoctrinated them with false information about the world’s religions. According to Hubbard, these corrupted ‘thetans’ then latched onto the bodies of humans. As a result, individuals began carrying hundreds or thousands of invisible ‘body thetans’, that can only be removed by an expensive form of Scientology auditing.10

  Hubbard claimed obtaining this information nearly cost him his life. ‘In January and February of this year,’ he told his followers in a lecture recorded at Las Palmas, ‘I became very ill, almost lost this body, and somehow or another brought it off and obtained the material, and was able to live through it.’11 Hubbard said he broke his back, his knee and his arm in the course of gathering his research, but refused to give in. ‘I am very sure that I was the first one that ever did live through any attempt to attain that material.’12

  In the same lecture, Hubbard revealed that the Guardian’s Office, functioning under the leadership of his wife Mary Sue, had been able to isolate the source of all attacks against Scientology. ‘Our enemies on this planet are less than twelve men,’ Hubbard proposed, ‘They are members of the Bank of England and other higher financial circles. They own and control newspaper chains, and they are, oddly enough, directors in all the mental health groups in the world which have sprung up.’13

  The speech is significant in that Hubbard talks about the Sea Organization, or Sea Org, for the first time to a broader audience of Scientologists.14 In November of 1966, a mysterious note appeared on the bulletin board at Saint Hill, calling for volunteers with naval or seagoing experience.15 The note was taken down within an hour and those who had seen it were sworn to secrecy.16 Yvonne Gillham was part of the elite group who answered the call, joining the secretive Sea Project (later to be renamed the Sea Organization) without even telling her family.17 In the same month, the Hubbard Explorational Company Ltd was incorporated in London.18